Someone may be reading Jay MillAr’s the small blue.
btw, have you seen 30 ways to celebrate poetry month in Ottawa?

Another place to get your poem dose: The League of Canadian Poets have set up a LCP National Poetry Month blog and are putting up a poem or a few per day. So far, Dennis Cooley, rob mclennan and Linda Lee Crosfield.

Aha, that puts the finger on the problem with the whine, but I can’t write. I don’t have any ideas.

If I waited to know “who I was” or “what I was about” before I started “being creative”, well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things that we figure out who we are. —Austin Keon in How to Steal Like an Artist

It’s like someone saying, I can’t play sports. I’m not fit. Doing is a creating a capacity.
See also this Tales from Existence:

If you lay in juxtaposed observations or imaginings, there’s more room to move around ideas than when an idea lays its groundwork for a tower of final couplet.
What is the glue of gratification in things like ghazals? The gratification has to come in the curious mix of pings between what all is curated, or the draw in the aesthetics of display thru pleasing sounds despite the non-linear. The pleasure of being. But some people get pleasure from being led to a conclusion, being convinced or saddened or heartened.
Ideas around linear and laternal thinking…
Directed and less directed thought with gaps with readers to make leaps, glean impressions across somehow make me more content. I have something to do. I may still get bored but if a poem is structured so that I need imply and reply with my life’s knowings then its a richer walk.
I will respect a person therefore their efforts to make a tidy polished poem that sets out to tell a particular story for a predecided destination of tone. It’s a skill and such control is not easy to master. One might even find a route that surprises the writer and audience.
Still, at the end, is the audience directed where and how to sit, what to feel on cue. I resist such. It doesn’t give a pure pleasure, more a faint restlessness.
It is not dialogue. I am not brought into the communication but am made a consumer. What does presenting a summative map of most advised linear route between places do?
Even with an ambiguous tease of an ending, the part of the process that is fun, of exploring meanings is for writer alone and the reader shut out. What does it say about what poetry is to present only a story with most of the stuff removed? Is that not more the domain of oratory or straight story? What is it saying about identity when only pertitent suppporting evidence for one conclusion is presented? Many poems take themselves very seriously as top-down information source. They are works, final in tone, closed in the end, even if they may be edited more, or change their conclusions, they are not delivered ungelled, unresolved. And why is that?
I like what I have to work for more. There’s more room in a series of one offs to agree, disagree, and turn away or towards. The whole structure doesn’t collapse because any one premise is part of the conclusion.
I like a poem with a little humble confusion in it. Not wallowing in it. Not playing dumb in it but the musing with pieces, not satisfied that they will never need to fit, not convinced of the chaos of them, but bringing us in during an earlier stage. It seems like barricaded. It seems less like a public face.
With linear or lateral, you can reach the same points of cliché yahoo or heartstring pluck, or fuzzing off into a vague anti-climax, or never reach a tension or attention. It’s not the route. But it is.
One constant mood to a poem, one worldview that is darkly comic, or everybody’s a good ole boy here, or isn’t the world just the profoundest place you’ve ever been, or an inventory of evocative weather, if there’s no upending, I mistrust the narration. I seem to need pivots of the pov undercutting self and rethinking in order to engage in the dialogue with the poem.

This year’s NationalPoetryMonth.ca celebrates visual poetry from collage, asemic writing, comics, concrete, crotcheted poems, to found poems, poems based on imaginary quilting patterns and more. Poets from Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Hungary, and the USA. contributed to NationalPoetryMonth.ca this year, reminding us that poetry transcends all boundaries, including geographic. I hope you enjoy this month’s tribute to what sometimes seems to me to be an unsung poetic form, the visual poem.
Throughout the month of April, NationalPoetryMonth.ca will feature a visual poem a day by Eric Zboya, Camille Martin, Gil McElroy, Márton Koppány, Matthew Stolte, Reed Altemus, Satu Kaikkonen, mIEKAL aND, andrew topel, Bob Grumman, Helen Hajnoczky, Joel Lipman, Aileen Beno, Vern Frazer, Bill DiMichele, Chad Lietz, Anatol, Christine McNair, Gary Barwin, Pearl Pirie, John M. Bennett, Marcus McCann, Geof Huth, John C. Goodman, derek beaulieu, Megan Zucher, Sheila E. Murphy, Lily Robert-Foley, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, and Michèle Provost. Enjoy!
www.nationalpoetrymonth.ca